God's Transforming Love

In 2010, Highland began to think about what orients this “thinking, feeling, healing community of faith.”  It seemed that in the midst of numeric and programmatic success we found ourselves doing an array of initiatives to promote God’s work of love, but hadn’t named the orienting framework upon which our church built its unique expression of faith. Another way we learned to name our need was to ask: What is our WHY?

We came up with the center pole of “God’s Transforming Love: the Heart of It All.”

This phrase builds on the mystery and mercy of God, who is Love, who created the world by love, because of love, for love.  We see that God’s deliverance to Adam and Abraham and Ishmael and Israel and Moses and ultimately to all the world in Jesus is a love-centered enterprise.

This God-Love forms and heals us; it compels us and consecrates us; it orients our journey and frames our language.

Ultimately, God’s Love transforms us – it starts with what we are and through Love is remaking us into something new, sacred, whole and holy.  We also use words like reshapes, reboots, retrofits our lives from sin-centered, selfish, ego-driven, lost, and into lives of healing, hope, reconciliation, peace.  This is, for Highland, what we mean when we speak of “being saved.”

We are transformed (“saved”) for more than simply our deliverance from hell.  We believe we are transformed by God in order to be agents of God’s desire to transform every corner of creation, to storm the gates of hell in the here and now in order to bring to fulfillment the prayer Jesus taught: “Your kingdom come, your will be done on earth.”

We’ve envisioned ourselves in a kind of dance around the center pole of God’s Transforming Love. You can enter the dance through any “door.”  You can join the dancing even if you don’t yet know the tune or the lyrics, even if you don’t yet know what you think of God (there’s a lot of people out there for whom “God” is a scary or off-putting word). Enter any door.  Stand on the edges for a while to get your bearings if you need to.  Then join in when you’re ready.